Today, online stores, such as the iTunes™ Store provided by Apple Inc. of Cupertino, Calif., allow customers (i.e., online users) via the Internet to purchase or rent media items (such as music, videos) or software programs. Often, at online stores, numerous digital items are made available and are provided by various different providers, such as music labels, movie companies, and application developers. Software tools, such as iProducer™ and iTunes Connect™ available from Apple Inc., can assist providers with online submission of digital items to the iTunes™ Store.
Since submission involves transmission of digital files over the Internet to online stores for distribution, the submission process can be time consuming to a submitter. When the digital files are large or voluminous, the transmission of the digital files for the submission can take a substantial duration of time. Even after the time consuming transmission has been endured, the digital files of the submission may fail quality checks. That is, submissions of digital files, such as media items, are typically encoded and then reviewed before being made available for distribution. The review of submissions is also time consuming and often the submissions are rejected due to some part of the submissions being defective, wrong or of poor quality. In such cases, the submitter is typically notified of the problem(s) with the prior submission. The submitter can then act to correct the problem(s) and resubmit the entire submission.
Unfortunately, however, given that submissions are often rejected and then later resubmitted, performing quality review of submissions can be inefficient since reviewers can be required to re-review submissions. Consequently, there is a need for improved approaches to manage review of submissions of digital assets for online distribution.